The Spy Who Saved Israel

Uri
Bar-Joseph
is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa,
Israel. He has written numerous scholarly works, including six books,
on intelligence, Israel’s national security doctrine, and the
history of the Arab-Israeli wars, and has served for more than 10
years as an active-duty and a reserve-duty intelligence analyst in
the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) Intelligence/Research Division. He is
the author of The
Angel: The Egyptian Spy
Who Saved Israel (Harper, August
2016)

Frederick
Forsyth
once wrote that “The spies in history who can say from their
graves, the information I supplied to my masters, for better or
worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the
fingers of one hand.” Although his story had
been
mostly unknown so far, Ashraf Marwan, the son in-law of Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a close advisor of his successor
President Anwar Sadat, and a Mossad spy for 28 years, is one of these
few.

Born
to a well-respected family in Cairo in 1944, Marwan made his way to
the top by marrying Nasser’s
daughter, Mona, in 1966.
In 1969 he started working at the Presidential Palace, first under
his father-in-law and, after Nasser’s death in September 1970, as
Sadat’s close aide. In late 1970, motivated by a combination of
ego, greed, and a need for risk-taking, he offered his services to
the Israeli Mossad. Within a short period of time, under the codename
“The Angel,” he became Israel’s greatest spy, and one of the
most important in modern history.

Two
main factors contributed to Marwan’s importance. One was the
strategic context of Egyptian-Israeli relations: In the wake of the
War of Attrition along the Suez Canal, which ended in 1970, Egypt
began preparing for war with the aim of retaking the Sinai Peninsula
that it had lost to the Israelis in the 1967 Six Day War. Second,
Marwan had unparalleled access to his nation’s best-kept secrets.
Serving as Sadat’s aide-de-camp, he was ideally positioned to
provide Israel with information about the coming war—including the
full Egyptian war plans, detailed accounts of miiltary exercises,
original documentation of Egypt’s arm deals with the Soviet Union
and other countries, the Egyptian military Order of Battle, the
minutes from meetings of the high command, accounts of Sadat’s
private conversations with other Arab leaders, and even the protocols
of secret summit meetings in Moscow between Sadat and Soviet Premier
Leonid Brezhnev.

All
this information made its way to the desks of Israeli Prime Minister
Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and the Israeli Defense
Force (IDF) chief of staff in raw form. By providing these documents
as well as his own assessments, Marwan turned his country, Israel’s
main enemy, into an open book, shaping Israel’s strategic and
tactical approach to Egypt and allowing the Israelis a direct look at
Egypt’s war calculus, including Sadat’s minimal requirements for
launching a war. To go to war, they learned, Sadat believed he needed
to get his hands on long-range attack aircraft and Scud missiles,
without which he would not be able to overcome Israeli air
superiority.

After
years of efforts to acquire them, however, Sadat made the decision in
October 1972 to go to war anyway, together with Syria, without these
weapons. Marwan reported on this decision, and the year of intensive
military preparations that followed, as well. Yet for some reason,
key figures in Israel’s intelligence community continued to believe
that Sadat would not go to war without possessing the weapons needed
to neutralize Israeli air superiority. Their mistake led Israel to
the brink of catastrophe when war was finally launched on October 6,
1973.

The
Yom Kippur War, the most intense confrontation in the history of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, is also the most traumatic event in Israeli
history.
In the first twenty-four hours of battle Israel’s defense line
along the Suez Canal fell, allowing Egypt to massively penetrate the
Sinai; on the Syrian front, about half the territory of the Golan
Heights was lost as well. More than 500 Israeli soldiers lost their
lives during the first day, and the total number of soldiers killed
would approach 3,000—as a proportion of the small population, it
would have been the equivalent of losing 180,000 American soldiers in
combat. On the eve of battle, Israel had seen itself as an unrivalled
regional power; less than twenty-four hours later, Defense Minister
Dayan spoke about “the fight for the ‘Third Temple.’ ” Just
as Jerusalem’s First Temple had been destroyed in 586 BCE and the
Second Temple in 70 CE, the third Jewish commonwealth was again under
threat of destruction.

What
prevented an Israeli defeat was a last-minute warning Marwan
delivered to
Zvi Zamir, chief of the Mossad, in an emergency meeting in London on
October 5:
“War will break out tomorrow.” Here Marwan proved to be more
valuable than all of Israel’s most sophisticated surveillance
equipment, more precious than the entire network of spies the
Israelis had spent years cultivating, and in some respects more
useful even than Israel’s own intelligence chiefs. Because of this
warning, Israel began mobilizing its forces on the morning of October
6—hours before
the attack was launched. Without his warning, we now know, the entire
Golan Heights would have been lost, and the war would have ended with
far greater Israeli losses of both territory and life.

Ultimately,
the 1973 war ended in a kind of a draw. Thanks to Marwan’s
intelligence, the IDF was able to recover from its initial defeats
and reached a military victory on both fronts, though neither the
Egyptian nor the Syrian army collapsed. The cost of the war led
Israel to return the whole of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace—a
deal that prior to the war had been explicitly rejected by the
Israelis. Egypt, strengthened by what it saw as victory, left the
Soviet camp and became an American ally, marking an important Soviet
retreat in the Middle East. Tensions rose between Washington and
Moscow, putting a pause on détente, and the Arab oil embargo that
was launched during the war, purportedly in response to American
assistance to Israel, led to a global economic recession during the
1970s.

Both
the positive and negative consequences of the war were the result of
the fact that it ended in a draw. Marwan played a central role in
that outcome. And in this sense, he may be counted among the tiny
number of spies who can say from their graves: “the information I
supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of
our planet.”